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Holy
Trinity, Loddon

Norfolk towns
can seem very insular. England is so small that very few
parts of it achieve the sense you get in France of small
towns so remote that they acquire the functions and
significance of larger towns. East Anglia, parts of the
West Country, Cumbria perhaps. Loddon is not particularly
far from anywhere; Beccles and Bungay are both within ten
miles, and are larger. Ah, but they are in Suffolk
you see, and along the Waveney valley the border still
seems to mean something. And so here is Loddon, with a
barely 5,000 souls even including adjacent Chedgrave, but
it still has its bank, shops, pubs, library, and so on.

As well as the magnificence of Holy
Trinity, its vast graveyard spreading beyond the market
square, there is a very grand Methodist church, St John.
The two communities are effectively merged, and, as the The
Church in Loddon site says, there has been an
Anglican/Methodist united Church in Loddon for more than
25 years now, and we share everything - ministers,
buildings, bank account, etc. and have one Joint Church
Council. We worship in Holy Trinity in the summer and in
St. John's in the winter. I understand that the
town's Catholics, who do not have their own building in
Loddon but are part of the parish of Poringland, also
share in the worship of the community on occasions. It is
all very pleasing, and no doubt gets up the noses of
local fundamentalists, which can only be a good thing.

Holy Trinity is a big church, and
its vastness isn't really apparent until you get close up
- the graveyard is so wide. The size of the building is a
result of the late medieval piety of the local Hobart
family, particularly Sir James Hobart, who is depicted
inside. He arranged the complete rebuilding in the 1480s,
so it is all of a piece and roughly contemporary with
Suffolk's even bigger Southwold, with which it has some similarities. The
tower was topped out in the early years of the sixteenth
century, the massive porch following soon after, and
there you are, a complete church more or less, with
nothing for the Reformation to interrupt. And yet the
Reformers left their mark almost immediately, as we shall
see.

Amazingly, the image of the Holy
Trinity in the niche above the south entrance is medieval
- it was discovered under floorboards during what was by
anyone's standards a massive Victorian restoration of the
inside. The head of God the Father is a replacement, but
it is still awesome.

I arrived here a few days after the
tsunami had destroyed so much of the Indian Ocean rim. At
this time, it wasn't clear just how appalling the
destruction was, but The Church in Loddon had
organised prayers in Holy Trinity, and it so happened
that these began as I stepped into the church. Now, I had
no problem with this, as it is good to see a church being
used for one of its proper purposes. As a Catholic, I am
used to people wandering around, children playing noisily
and other stuff going on during Mass; but I know
Anglicans don't like it much (I am unsure of the
Methodist position on extra-curricular activity) and so I
quietly waited at the back, photographing the font and
the west window, the sound of the hushed voices and their
just-perceptible words putting me in a meditative frame
of mind.

The font is grand,
elegant even, but almost entirely defaced. It must have
been magnificent in its heyday, and is still imposing. A
bequest of 1487 paid for it, a font depicting the seven
sacraments of the Catholic church, part of the
reinforcing of orthodox Catholic teaching that is one of
the main features of the late 15th century English
church, probably in the face of local superstitions and
abuses. Pevsner, Mortlock and the guidebook here suggest
that the panels were destroyed in 1642; the
churchwardens' accounts show that a Mr Rochester, a
glazier of Beccles, was paid six shillings for the
destruction of images. I don't believe for a moment that
this means the font.

The early 1640s was the time of a
great reaction against surviving 'superstitious imagery'.
The most famous exponent of this was the iconoclast
William Dowsing, who furthered the Puritan project by
travelling through almost 400 churches in Suffolk and
Cambridgeshire, putting the world to protestant rights.
Dowsing was just one of several iconoclasts at work at
this time, but he is infamous because he kept a diary of
his activities, and the diary has survived.
Interestingly, Dowsing hardly ever mentions images in
stone, and only once does he mention imagery on a font.
And yet we know he visited several churches where there
are fine seven sacrament fonts today, and others where
there are magnificent screens with images of Saints. How
come Dowsing didn't destroy them? Simple. He didn't
see them.

The greater part of the destruction
of English churches had taken place a full century before
Dowsing made his way around southern East Anglia. The
injunctions against images of the 1530s make it
impossible that anything in the way of statues or wall
paintings survived to the time of the Puritans. The
Anglicans were busy cleansing the buildings of their
forefathers, making way for the creation of their new
model Church of England. But destruction can take several
forms, and in many cases it was easier to plaster over
imagery than to destroy it - why bother to smash up the
font and replace it when you can as easily plaster it
over? Rood screens and wallpaintings were also easily
covered. But we must assume that in some parishes it was
considered easier to chisel off the panels on a font than
to cover them, and that is what appears to have happened
at Loddon. If asked to guess, I would suggest that the
autumn of 1547, with Henry VIII dying and the theological
gloves coming off, would have been the ideal time for
some Loddon Anglican to take the future into his own
hands and erase the sacraments on the font. Bet he didn't
bother to get a faculty.

So how come stained glass survived
for another century? Unlike the Puritans, the Anglicans
were pragmatists. They only destroyed Catholic imagery
that was accessible, so statues, carvings and
wall-paintings went, but angels remote in hammerbeam
roofs and gable end crosses survived. And nothing was
destroyed that would cause the Anglicans more trouble
than the destruction was worth; it would have been
madness to put out all the glass when it could not easily
be replaced.

The Puritans had no such qualms.
The images in stone and wood had all been destroyed
before the memory of anyone left alive, and the
sacraments on fonts had also disappeared from sight so
long ago that probably nobody knew they had ever existed.
But at Loddon, as elsewhere, the stained glass still
needed to be dealt with. Enter Mr Rochester, a glazier.

I mused on all this while I waited
for the prayers to end. There were five in the group, a
minister and four of his congregation, which made it
intimate and powerful, and although I added my silent
prayers to theirs, I didn't want to join them. What I
mostly wanted was to go and photograph the screen; but
this was impossible, because their chairs were grouped in
front of it, and even I am not that rude.

Eventually, their prayers turned
into discussion of an impending wedding, and so I assumed
they had finished, and wandered eastwards. I have to say
that I was greeted with a certain amount of hostility;
two of the women failed to return my smile (which I have
always been told is charming) and didn't allow me more
than a flicker of eye contact.

"I hope I didn't disturb
you", I said to the minister. "Oh no, not at
all!" he gushed hurriedly in an embarrassed manner,
as if he had somehow let the side down by being affable.
They all carried on as if I wasn't there, while I moved
their chairs out the way to photograph the screen.

Loddon screen is absolutely
fascinating, and for me the highlight of the church. It
depicts a rosary sequence from the birth of the Blessed
Virgin to the Presentation in the Temple (the south side
of the screen is completely lost, but was probably a
Passion sequence). Two things make the screen remarkable.
Firstly, the cartoon quality of the work, as if the
blocks of colour had been outlined in black felt-tip,
which gives it a Flemish feel, and the fact that there is
an odd-panel-out, the sequence being interrupted by the
highly unusual martyrdom of St William of Norwich.

Jewish communites had been expelled
from England in 1290 (they were eventually allowed to
return by Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s) but before this
there had been a number of hideous pogroms. One in
Norwich in 1144, which resulted in a number of deaths,
arose from the malicious story that the Jews of Norwich
had sacrificed a Christian child on the eve of the
Passover to provide blood for rituals. It is unlikely
that there really had been such a death, let alone a
murder; but the sensationalising of the event by the
local Christian community led to the eventual
canonisation of the supposed dead child as St William of
Norwich. This all seems so off the wall as to be quaint -
but I ought to warn you that, even today, if you put the
words 'Loddon' and 'Jews' in an internet search engine it
takes you straight to the website of a right wing
fundamentalist American anti-semitic organisation, who
report the event as fact and present Loddon screen as
evidence, unless, and I quote, the Power of
Jewish Money has had it removed.

Incidentally, if anyone is really
interested in conspiracy theories, a regular user of this
site tells me that the computers of Southend Borough
Council blot out the page you are currently reading
because, and I quote, it contains material related to
the occult. It seems to me that the screen panel is
most powerful as evidence of the history of the Christian
persecution of the Jews; so as you can see, I was pretty
keen to get a photograph, if only to prove the lunatic
crackpot conspiracy theories of these Nazi publishers of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion wrong. If I
mysteriously disappear under a bus tomorrow, you'll know
why. You can see it below.

The martyrdom is panel I of the
dado. It is preceded by St Anne and the young Blessed
Virgin on the gate to the north chancel chapel - sadly,
only half of this remains. Panel II is the Annunciation,
perhaps the best of the lot, and then the Visitation and
Nativity share panel III. In IV is a circumcision that is
a bit graphic for my liking, V is the Adoration of the
Magi, and VI part of the Presentation in the Temple.

As you'd expect with a
big church, this is a pleasant place to wander. There are
a number of brasses, all to the Hobart family in the 14th
and 15th centuries, but perhaps most remarkable tomb is
that of the wonderfully named Lady Dionys Williamson. She
died in 1684, having been the single largest contributor
to the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral after the fire,
as well as bankrolling the rebuilding of St
Dunstan-in-the-East and St Mary-le-Bow. I found the
memorial to the Cadge brothers in the north aisle
profoundly moving, as I had recently read a lot about the
effects of WWI on East Anglian communities. I sauntered
around a while, and then thought I'd better be moving on.
I said goodbye to a couple of the people engrossed in
conversation, but they didn't reply. Oh well. They can
obviously live without me.

Before heading on to
the real outback, we took advantage of Loddon's local
services, patronising one of the high street pubs. I
won't tell you what it was called, because quite frankly
I don't have the time or energy to keep answering e-mails
from solicitors, but let's just say the name of the pub
was not without theological significance. Honestly, I'm
sorry to keep moaning about Loddon, but the beer was sour
and the pie was foul. The seats had the stuffing coming
out, and I sat back wondering at it all. Two local lads
on the pool table were checking their watches to make
sure they didn't miss their bus home - their trip into
Loddon to play pool had apparently been the highlight of
their week. Sometimes the 21st century can seem a long
way away.